


Adrift

by TheColorBlue



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen, on being free, on being yourself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-05
Updated: 2011-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-24 08:17:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/261143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim is twenty-two and he reads in his spare time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adrift

Jim is twenty-two. He has been out of his mother's house for three years. He has been working as a mechanic at a local shop, and on his free days he camps out at the public library, rifling through the online databases: reading up on current events, scientific and medical journals, linguistics, anthropology, biology, history, alien planets. Jim is smart, and he's always known it. He reads, because if he doesn't read he feels like he stagnates, like he's losing brain cells out in this rural Iowa town, surrounded by farmlands and the starship assembly plant and not much else. When he was seven, he was reading _The Lord of the Rings, The Count of Monte Cristo, Ivanhoe_. He still reads novels, hunting up books by the best literary minds of the past couple centuries--devouring them and trying to imagine what would it be like--what it would be like to be someone else, somewhere else. When he was seven, he had hunted up every article he could find on his father, reading the texts religiously. Every boyfriend his mother brought home could not live up to the image of the hero he had built up in his mind.

When he was eleven, his brother Sam left home and his mother was off planet and his stepfather walloped him for letting Sam get away with stealing money from his wallet, and Jim drove his stepfather's antique automobile off a mining cliff.

The police officer was standing over him, dark against the glare of the sun. Jim's palms were scrapped raw and bleeding.

And Jim knew he would never be like his father.

Jim spends his days off reading. Perusing the catalogs until his eyes hurt from staring at a bright screen too long without rest, or his back hurts from slouching in the plastic seat. Or he goes out and drives _fast_ through the empty country roads, dust flying up behind him and hair whipped back. Or he'll park his bike and take aimless walks out where it's quiet and empty except the insects buzzing and the sun setting golden and pale. And then when it gets dark, Jim hits the clubs and bars. He drinks until he is stupid with the alcohol, and then takes a new girl home every night.

Jim is sitting at the counter the night Starfleet cadets come into the bar. A group of them have been around the last couple of days as part of a recruiting program in town. Jim watches the red uniforms move through the dark of the room, as the music pulses loud and heavy in the background. He thinks: he _knows_ that he's smarter than three-quarters of the lot of them combined. The heavies and the expendables being trained for what really amounted to peace-keeping and humanitarian militaristic combat. He empties his glass and glances sideways at the girl who's just come up to the counter. Then he could have whistled, _here_ is a girl who looks good in uniform.

 _Xenolinguistics_ she says.

And he says _the study of language, morphology, semantics, semiotics_.

He knows that he's smart.

He grins at her, and the look she turns back is flat, unpersuaded.

Whether he acts it is his business, not theirs.


End file.
